sure--that, if I had known you, not all the terrors of my father
would have made me marry the man."

Was this all the feeling she had for her dead husband? Although Godfrey
could hardly at the moment feel regret she had not loved him, it yet
made him shiver to hear her speak of him thus. In the perfected
grandeur of her external womanhood, she seemed to him the very ideal of
his imagination, and he felt at moments the proudest man in the great
world; but at night he would lie in torture, brooding over the horrors
a woman such as she must have encountered, to whom those mysteries of
our nature, which the true heart clothes in abundant honor, had been
first presented in the distortions of a devilish caricature. There had
been a time in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her
splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a
sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was
humbler. When those terrible thoughts would come, and the darkness
about him grow billowy with black flame, "God help me," he would cry,
"to make the buffeted angel forget the past!"

They had talked of Mary more than once, and Godfrey, in part through
what Hesper told him of her, had come to see that he was unjust to her.
I do not mean he had come to know the depth and extent of his
injustice--that would imply a full understanding of Mary herself, which
was yet far beyond him. A thousand things had to grow, a thousand
things to shift and shake themselves together in Godfrey's mind, before
he could begin to understand one who cared only for the highest.

Godfrey and Hesper made a glorious pair to look at--but would theirs be
a happy union?--Happy, I dare say--and not too happy. He who sees to
our affairs will see that the _too_ is not in them. There were fine
elements in both, and, if indeed they loved, and now I think, from very
necessity of their two hearts, they must have loved, then all would, by
degrees, by slow degrees, most likely, come right with them.

If they had been born again both, before they began, so to start fresh,
then like two children hand in hand they might have run in through the
gates into the city. But what is love, what is loss, what defilement
even, what are pains, and hopes, and disappointments, what sorrow, and
death, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, but means to this very
end, to this waking of the soul to seek the home of our being--the life
eternal? Verily we